Uiteenzetting over de opkomst van het populisme en het gevaar daarvan voor de democratie.

Drawing from extensive archival research, the book uncovers the American media system's historical roots and normative foundations. It charts the rise and fall of a forgotten media-reform movement to recover alternatives and paths not taken.

Every four years, journalists propel a presidential campaign into the national consciousness. New candidates and issues become features of the political landscape while familiar rituals are reshaped by the unpredictability of personalities and events. Underlying this apparent process of change, however, is a recurrent cycle of political themes and social attitudes, a pulse of politics that locks the process of choosing a president into a predictable pattern. In this bold and brilliant examination of modern presidential politics, James David Barber reveals the dynamics of this cycle and shows how the pattern of drift and reaction may be broken in this most critical of political choices. Barber probes beneath the surface of campaigns to detect a steady rhythm of major political motifs. The theory he advances in colorful narrative chapters is that three dominant themes-conflict, conscience, conciliation-recur in foreseeable twelve-year cycles. A combative campaign-Truman vs. Dewey in 1948-is followed four years later by a moral crusade-Eisenhower vs. Stevenson in 1952-which in turn is succeeded by a contest to unify the nation-the Eisenhower-Stevenson rematch in 1956. The pattern is then renewed: the fierce combat between Kennedy and Nixon in 1960 was followed in 1964 by the contest of principle between Johnson and Goldwater. In 1968 Richard Nixon defeated Hubert Humphrey by promising to bring the nation together. Monitoring shifting national political moods is a new elite: the journalists. Barber makes the case that the party system, increasingly clumsy and inflexible, can no longer pick up the beat of politics. Instead it is through newspapers, magazines, and television that the main themes of a campaign are sounded, created, and destroyed. This new edition of The Pulse of Politics provides a timely guide to the themes of the 1992 presidential campaign and to future elections. It will be of special interest to political scientists, historians, media analysts, and journalists.

Under what conditions do citizens most effectively connect to the democratic process? We tend to think that factors like education, income, and workforce participation are most important, but research has shown that they exert less influence than expected when it comes to women's attitudes and engagement. Scholars have begun to look more closely at how political context affects engagement. This book asks how contexts promote women's interest and connection to democracy, and it looks to Latin America for answers. The region provides a good test case as the institution of gender quotas has led to more recent and dramatic increases in women's political representation. Specifically, Magda Hinojosa and Miki Caul Kittilson argue that the election of women to political office--particularly where women's presence is highly visible to the public--strengthens the connections between women and the democratic process. For women, seeing more "people like me" in politics changes attitudes and orientations toward government and politics. The authors untangle the effects of gender quotas and the subsequent rise in women's share of elected positions, finding that the latter exerts greater impact on women's connections to the democratic process. Women citizens are more knowledgeable, interested, and efficacious when they see women holding elected office. They also express more trust in government and in political institutions and greater satisfaction with democracy when they see more women in politics. The authors look at comparative data from across Latin America, but focus on an in-depth case study of Uruguay. Here, the authors find that gender gaps in political engagement declined significantly after a doubling of women's representation in the Senate. The authors therefore argue that far-reaching gender gaps can be overcome by more equitable representation in our political institutions.